


The Monsters and Me

by Greykite



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Ardat-Yakshi, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Horror Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:53:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23785840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greykite/pseuds/Greykite
Summary: Rila and the monsters: in three ages of life.
Relationships: Falere & Morinth & Rila (Mass Effect)
Kudos: 8





	The Monsters and Me

Rila is five, and she draws monsters.  
The monsters have gray skin and long clawed hands; their wide mouths are torn by smiles that cannot contain all the teeth — sharp, long, fishy. The monsters have not just appendages on the back of their heads (ke-ra-ti-ni-zed, her older sister says impressively, pointing at her head - Rila herself has only bumps on her nape, yet), but real tentacles, like the sea-beast in the seaquarium where their mother took them. The monsters have long legs, like dancers Rila wasn't supposed to look at, but she was looking anyway, on the Holo-V, hiding behind a chair in the company of Mirala — who absolutely wouldn't betray.  
Black slime drips from the monsters, and Rila is happy to pour paint on the broad sheets of paper until they crumple, then rolls paper into balls, soiling her palms in the process, and throws these balls away — imagining that she is throwing fear with them: far, far away, beyond the neighboring galaxy.  
Rila is afraid that if one day she stops drawing these monsters, whose images stubbornly climbing out of her head, they will come out of her in some other way, through her chest or stomach, and then there will be nothing left of Rila herself.

Rila is forty-five and is told that she is a monster.  
She weeps, forgetting about shame, her face in her hands, in front of the justicar, the psychiatrist, and the temple initiate — the commission charged with determining her condition. Neither of them says a word of comfort to her; the silence weighs on her shoulders, making them sink lower. Of course, she understands that her sister is a killer, and no one has to believe that she is not like that (even if she has never tried melding, and has not even managed to make a girlfriend), and yet resentment rises in her throat, making it even more difficult to breathe. Her crystal-harp and air drums is still in the bag that the police officer had asked her to leave outside — and Rila had already been made clear that she would never see her musical instruments again. In the monastery, the initiate explains, there are others, more traditional. Rila sobs one last time and looks up — but in the three pairs of eyes opposite her she sees nothing but emptiness, and also fear; a mean, cowardly horror — "save us the Goddess!" And Rila can't help it — her lips part in a smile that is absurd and desperate, like her mother's prayer pose outside the door (Rila can clearly see her silhouette behind others backs even now).  
The justicar flinches at this smile, then frowns — and Rila feels the biotic handcuffs closing around her wrists, but still can't stop smiling. (Mirala, after all — she remembers — always tried to be serious, just like their mother.)

Rila is somewhere between four hundred and five hundred years old (in a monastery it quickly becomes unnecessary to count the years accurately), and the monsters come for her for real. They fill the corridors and cells with wobbly, howling shadows, their teeth are bared in lipless mouths and they smile: all-accepting, inviting. The monsters stretch out their arms and call for her — you are ours, you always knew that! - and look straight into her face without blinking, and Rila staggers, feeling her eyes are swooning black. And viscous, thick, tar-like substance flows inside her, screeching into her ears like a high-pitched scream, — so pervasive and so complete that Rila does not immediately realize that she is now being held by the hand, being dragged away, and the blue glow is all around, twitching slightly: a protective biotic field.  
Rila is angry at Falere for saving her; Rila, unlike her sister, had always known this truth. They are monsters, and in the eyes of their mother - who has come to them too late - there is an echo of the same vile, old-time fear; and if the face of the Banshee, forever frozen in a distorted smile, is exactly what everyone, who looks at the ardat-yakshi, would like to see — why delay the inevitable?..  
_Why not take revenge for it?_ the wind whispers through the broken windows, whispers in Mirala's voice, but Rila's hand is clenched on the cold metal of the detonator nevertheless. She closes her eyes.  
Even if Falere is wrong at all. Even if they are monsters.  
They are their own monsters, and always have been their own.  
When the sharp claws-fingers from her childhood dreams wrap around the back of her head — gently, like a lover’s caress (a lover that Rila never had, never will have) — Rila tosees her head up. There is no fear in her. Not a drop of regret.  
She smiles, pressing her forehead against the Banshee's. Just as she had smiled at the members of the _a-y_ commission in the past.  
"Everything will be alright. That is, there will be nothing more."


End file.
